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Stephen Colbert will leave his "Colbert Report" Comedy Central show and fake-conservative persona to replace David Letterman as host of CBS' "The Late Show" when Letterman retires in 2015.
(AP Photo/CBS, John Paul Filo)

From Splitsider's Megh Wright: "At the end of this year, Stephen Colbert the character — the dim,
truthy, pompous, narcissistic right-winger we've come to love — will
retire and become TV comedy history."

From Jesse David Fox, at Vulture: "I am truly happy for Stephen Colbert, but still, I'm left feeling
seriously bummed. Stephen Colbert will do great in his new job. I'm
fairly certain of this. But is it really worth losing 'Stephen Colbert,'
maybe the single greatest comedic character ever built on TV?"

From Emily Bazelon, at Slate, on why she'll miss appearing on "The Colbert Report": "I’m excited for Colbert to remake network late night. But I’m also
mourning, for a moment, the passing of his character. It was such a
distinct performance, a lark that also took all of us, as viewers, on a
deep dive into American politics. I never worry when people tell me
their main sources of news are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report
because we learn a ton while we laugh. And in fact, Colbert’s greatest
skill is that he asks great questions. That part he’ll take with him."

There's also a persistent cliche that Millennials get their news from satirical shows like "The Colbert Report," though that seems a bit dubious and condescending.

So I feel like an outlier for saying it, but I think it's good news that Colbert is moving on from "The Colbert Report" and his alter ego. It's not that "The Colbert Report" hasn't been brilliant, and brought a unique combination of satire and performance art to the late-night talk show format. It's just time for a change.

1) The quote-unquote real Stephen Colbert is, as we've heard in interviews, funny, thoughtful, informed, empathetic, and smart. He's not an overgrown kid, in the way that Jimmy Fallon -- for all his talent -- sometimes seems to be. Colbert's humor is precise, and cuts where it needs to, without stooping to adolescent-guy pandering (which Jimmy Kimmel, though he gets better all the time, still sometimes does.)

2) Leaving the "Colbert Report" persona behind also means -- fingers crossed -- that on "The Late Show," we won't have to endure a hollering, hooting, shrieking audience who may or may not know that they're coming across like party-hearty frat boys.

3) The best part of "The Colbert Report" -- timely deconstructions of political hypocrisy, media bloat, and so on -- fits perfectly into a network late-night show format.

4) In interviews, the "real" Colbert can ask questions an intelligent person would ask, while still playfully subverting the tired celeb-here-to-plug-a-project convention, a trait he's brought to "The Colbert Report" (and is a move Letterman helped pioneer.)

5) Parodying a ridiculously opinionated, transparently politically partisan talk-show host -- an obvious inspiration is Fox's Bill O'Reilly -- was a fresh concept when "The Colbert Report" began, in 2005. But it feels like Colbert has gone as far as he can with his creation. Doing a comic persona is inherently limiting (Professor Irwin Corey had his fans, but come on.) Being free of the caricature that is "Stephen Colbert" can only be liberating for Colbert, and it gives him the freedom to create new innovations.

So, let "The Colbert Report" enjoy its victory lap in the eight months left. Then, Colbert can set out for his brave new world.